Comment Wall

Bangladesh's famous financier uses micro-credit to bring wealth to the
underprivileged of many nations, reports Rosemary Righter

Professor Muhammad Yunus in London this week on the publication of his new
book

Visionary banker sets free powerless poor

If you went to see a Western banker after a natural disaster had wiped out
half his business clients, you would be in for a grim hour. That is
exactly the position that Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Bangladesh's
Grameen Bank, is in. This year's floods, the worst in the country's
history, covered half the land and affected 25 million people. But
Professor Yunus is totally, amazingly, unflapped.

He is a paradox, a personally modest man in traditional dress who lives
simply in a small flat "over the shop", an ambitious businessman and a
visionary convinced that he has picked one of the locks that imprison the
poor. His key is credit - minute sums, borrowed mainly by illiterate
women, to set up the smallest imaginable enterprises.

He calls it micro-credit. And it works. After 24 years spent fighting the
sceptics, Grameen is a $2.5 billion (#1.5 billion) business. Professor
Yunus could easily have prospered as one of the ilite band of
international economists that he has, instead, spent much of his life
puzzling and annoying with heretical ideas about the bankability of the
unbankable. His heart is plainly, movingly, soft, but there is nothing
soft-centred about his economics. They make Margaret Thatcher sound like a
social worker.

I had just finished Banker to the Poor*, the book he has written with Alan
Jolis. Not only does it read as swiftly as a thriller, it turns the dreary
science of development economics inside out. It is solidly in favour of
capitalist free markets, with the novel twist that it identifies capital
as the ally of the poor. It distrusts big government in general and the
welfare state in particular. It excoriates the wastage, incompetence and
corruption of much international aid. And it is charged with the
conviction that all human beings, no matter what their handicap, are able
to help themselves.

"You are the Adam Smith of the poor", I began, slightly wondering what he
would say. A brilliant smile: "Oh, thank you. Thank you." Even so, I felt
I had to qualify what I'd said. After all, this man spends his life
fighting poverty. I added something about the unread bits of The Wealth of
Nations, on social responsibility. I need not have worried.

"We need far less government. It would be wonderful if you didn't need it,
if you could just stick with it for formal occasions, like your Royal
Family. People were once afraid that they couldn't manage without absolute
rulers. Maybe we will find out that, except for justice, the police and
defence, we can do without government too. The public sector is on the way
out. And that is because it has failed." But what about the Bangladesh
disaster? How could people already so poor pick up the pieces?

"This won't destroy us. It gives us an opportunity. Just think of their
enterprise. The flood-water stood there for ten weeks and they survived,
with no income, using whatever capital, assets, they had, and now they are
going back to rebuild. Disasters like this reveal the pride and strength
and creativity of the poorest; and that is what Grameen helps them to
prove. Humans are designed to do a lot more than merely survive."

How can a bank help? "We have standard procedures. We have to; local
cyclones and floods happen all the time." So branches can declare a
disaster area without asking Dhaka - "that would be too slow" - and turn
into humanitarian agencies. Bank staff suspend loan repayments and instead
fan out to provide food, medicines, "whatever people need".

"But they keep a detailed record of what each person has received. And
whe

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Can you contribute TO FC? rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk<p></p> <p>2012 is our 40th year of research into future capitalism started by father's 20 years of surveys in The Economist from 1972- the Entrepreneurial Revolution Genre. We recommend that getting worldwide youth back to good jobs everywhere depends on changing the humanly most valuable purpose&#160; sustainable of 13 markets first -</p> <p><a href="http://futurecapitalism.ning.com/forum/topics/links-to-3-most-important-growth-markets-energy-smart-media-and" target="_self">3 for Growth: Energy, Colaboration Apps of Web-Tec, Smart Media and Edu,</a></p> <p>10 for preventing destrictive speculators: Healthcare including wastecare, Nutrition including access to food and water chains, banks and finacial services, entertainment and future of heroes, land and transparent politics of how its setwarded, transportion physical and virtual, other infrastructures, peace and personal security , do no harm professions, other things and services</p> <p>&#160;</p> <p>In the modern era, Gandhi with Einstein and Montessori were the first to revlutionise public dialogues on whole truth purpose of life critical markets</p> <p><a href="http://yourgandhi.blogspot.com">Gandhi's</a> whole truth Eureka in 1906 (?#1 living gandhian to alumni network - <a href="http://yunusuni.com">mandela)</a> was that when a nation or subclass were being chained ever more to poverty, system of government would need transforming and this in turn would require the three-in-one chnage to:<br /> professions, their rules<br /> media, what content speech was free, safe; what spaces and methods of dialog every person had access to<br /> education, in particular its vocational job-creating design and empowerment of each person to develop their competence<br /> <br /> The Bangladeshi race to end poverty in the poorest rural peoples on the planet emerged from 1976 with 3 more foci:<br /> sustaining the poor's own banks<br /> the poor's own healthcare services and knowhow in the community<br /> the development of clean water, agriculture and energy</p>